1922-2007
Who Was Kurt Vonnegut?
Kurt Vonnegut was a celebrated author known for his masterful blend of wry satire and science fiction. The Indiana native emerged as a novelist in the 1960s with the classic books Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five and went on to pen Breakfast of Champions in 1973. Considered one of the most influential American writers of the twentieth century, Vonnegut used fantastical elements in his writing to deliver pointed social commentary, tackling themes of inequality and injustice and drawing on his own experiences as a prisoner of war. Before his death in 2007, Vonnegut wrote a total of 14 novels, including five works of nonfiction, as well as several essays, short stories, and plays.
Quick Facts
FULL NAME: Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
BORN: November 11, 1922
DIED: April 11, 2007
BIRTHPLACE: Indianapolis, Indiana
SPOUSES: Jane Marie Cox (1945-1979) and Jill Krementz (1979-2007)
CHILDREN: Mark, Edith, Nanette, and Lily
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Scorpio
Early Life
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was born on November 11, 1922, in Indianapolis, Indiana to Edith and Kurt Vonnegut Sr. His father was an architect and his mother was a brewery heiress. He had two older siblings: a brother named Bernard and a sister named Alice. Growing up, Vonnegut's family was greatly impacted by the Great Depression, losing a substantial amount of wealth. The financial hardship made his mother depressed and she began to act abusively toward the family. “When my mother went off her rocker late at night, the hatred and contempt she sprayed on my father, as gentle and innocent a man as ever lived, was without limit and pure, untainted by ideas or information,” he later recalled.
Unlike his siblings, Vonnegut went to public school. As a teenager, he attended Shortridge High School, where he played clarinet in the jazz band and served on the student council. He also worked as a writer and editor at the student newspaper, the Shortridge Daily Echo, which greatly influenced his writing career. After graduating high school in 1940, Vonnegut enrolled at Cornell University, where he studied biochemistry and wrote for The Cornell Daily Sun. More interested in journalism than his major, he soon began failing his core classes and was placed on academic leave in 1942. The following year, Vonnegut dropped out of Cornell. To avoid being drafted, he enlisted in the U.S. Army to fight in World War II.
As part of his basic training, he was sent to study mechanical engineering at what is now Carnegie Mellon University in 1943 and later to the University of Tennessee. In 1944, Vonnegut was sent to Indiana's Camp Atterbury to train with the 106th Infantry Division. That May, he arrived home on leave for Mother's Day weekend to discover that his mother had committed suicide the night before.
Prisoner of War
Just months after her tragic death, Vonnegut was deployed to Europe as an intelligence scout with the infantry battalion. In December 1944, he fought in the famed Battle of the Bulge but was captured by German forces. “Bayonets aren’t much good against tanks,” he later wrote in a letter to his father. As a prisoner of war, Vonnegut was transported to a labor camp in Dresden, Germany, but on the way there, the train was mistakenly bombed by British fighter pilots. While many were killed, Vonnegut survived the bombing and eventually made it to Dresden, where he worked long hours at a malt-syrup factory and lived in a slaughterhouse.
In February 1945, the city was firebombed by Allied forces. Vonnegut escaped harm only because he, along with other POWs, was working in an underground meat locker making vitamin supplements. “It was cool there, with cadavers hanging all around,” Vonnegut told the Paris Review in 1977. “When we came up the city was gone.” In the aftermath of the bombing, he and other POWs were forced to recover bodies from the wreckage and carry them to mass funeral pyres. Surviving civilians cursed and threw rocks at them. Finally, in May 1945, Vonnegut was freed by the Soviets and was awarded a Purple Heart Medal upon his return to the U.S. His experience as an Army private and prisoner of war had a profound and traumatic effect on him that ultimately his shaped his anti-war stance, which he would go on to write about at length.
Reporter and Public Relations Writer
After the war, Vonnegut moved to Illinois and studied anthropology at the University of Chicago. He also worked as a part-time police reporter for the Chicago City News Bureau. Vonnegut complete his undergraduate coursework but dropped out when his master's thesis was rejected. In 1947, he accepted a job as a public relations writer for General Electric in Schenectady, New York. During this time, Vonnegut also pursued fiction writing on the side, submitting short stories to literary magazines.
After facing several rejections, his first story, “Report on the Barnhouse Effect,” was published in Collier's Weekly in February 1950. “I think on my way,” he wrote his father at the time. Knox Burger, the fiction editor at Collier's, who had briefly met the aspiring writer at Cornell, helped Vonnegut with his writing and published his second story “EPICAC” that November. Encouraged by his early success and dissatisfied with his “nightmare” corporate job, Vonnegut resigned from GE in early 1951 and moved his family to Cape Cod, Massachusetts to write full-time.
Books
Vonnegut published his first novel, Player Piano, in 1952. Inspired by his time at GE, the book criticized corporate culture and technology through a dystopian society in which machines have replaced human labor. Showcasing his talent for satire and science fiction, Player Piano was nominated for an International Fantasy Award the following year. While it received positive attention, it did not initially perform well commercially. Vonnegut soon got to work on his next novel, but the writing process took years to complete. In the interim, he continued to sell short stories to support his family and briefly ran a Saab dealership in 1957.
Sirens of Titan and Mother Night
Finally, in 1959, Vonnegut released Sirens of Titan, about a rich man who gets offered the chance to travel through space only to be forced to fight in the Martian Army. The book, which explored themes of free will, the absurdity of existence, and humanity's search for purpose, was a 1960 Hugo Award finalist for Best Novel. Soon after, the writer published Mother Night in 1961. Taking a break from science fiction, Vonnegut's third novel centered around an American playwright who becomes a Nazi propagandist while spying on the Germans during World War II. It was later adapted into a film in 1996, starring John Goodman.
Cat's Cradle
Vonnegut once again illustrated the negative impacts of technological and scientific advancements in Cat's Cradle in 1963. In the now celebrated book, a freelance writer interviews the creator of the atomic bomb and discovers a dangerous material called ice-nine, which brings about the apocalypse. In addition to critiquing unchecked scientific ambition, he also addressed the purpose of religion through the fictional creed of Bokononism, asserting that harmless truths help people cope with their existence.
Though he had left school years earlier, Vonnegut submitted Cat's Cradle as his master's thesis, and finally received his degree from the University of Chicago. He followed up with the greed-focused satire God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater in 1965. That same year, he began teaching at the Iowa Writer's Workshop, and in 1967, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to research his next project in Germany.
Slaughterhouse-Five
While war was a recurring element in his writing, one of his best-known works, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), draws some of its dramatic power from Vonnegut's own experiences. The title comes from the name of the building in Dresden where he was held as a prisoner of war. The main character, Billy Pilgrim, is a young soldier who becomes a prisoner of war and works in an underground meat locker, not unlike Vonnegut, but with a notable exception: Pilgrim begins to experience his life out of sequence and revisits different times repeatedly. He also has encounters with the alien species known as the Tralfamadorians.
This exploration of the human condition mixed with the fantastical struck a chord with readers, giving Vonnegut his first best-seller and significantly raising his profile as an author. Slaughterhouse-Five is now considered a seminal anti-war novel and is often taught in school. Like some of his other books, it also earned a film adaptation in 1972.
Breakfast of Champions
Emerging as a new literary voice, Vonnegut scored another bestseller with 1973's Breakfast of Champions, which spent a total of 56 weeks on The New York Times Best Seller List. In story, Kilgore Trout, an aging fiction writer discovers that unhappy car dealer Dwayne Hoover believes his writing is factual. Tackling race, sex, and politics, the witty satire explores how people perceive the truth. Breakfast of Champions also made it to the screen in 1999, with Bruce Willis starring as Hoover. Trout later appeared as the main character in Timequake (1997).
Vonnegut, who became known for his unusual writing style—long sentences and little punctuation—and humanist point of view, went on to write a total 14 novels, including Slapstick (1976), Deadeye Dick (1982), Galápagos (1985), and Hocus Pocus (1990), among others. He also published several short story collections, including the nonfiction work Palm Sunday (1981), and penned seven plays. His most notable play, Happy Birthday, Wanda June opened on Broadway in December 1970 and won him a Drama Desk Award for Most Promising Playwright. It was adapted into a film of the same name in 1971.
Wife and Children
Vonnegut was married twice in his lifetime. He met his first wife, Jane Marie Cox, as a child in elementary school. The pair started dating in high school and continued their relationship in college. They wed in 1945, shortly after Vonnegut returned from the war, and welcome their first child, a son named Mark, two years later. Cox was supportive of Vonnegut's career aspirations and even edited his short story submissions early on in their marriage. She gave birth to their daughter Edith in 1949. Not long after settling in Cape Cod, their third child, a daughter named Nanette, was born in 1954. Following the untimely death of his sister, Alice, in 1958, Vonnegut and Cox adopted her three oldest sons, Steven, Kurt, and James.
After 26 years of marriage, they separated in 1971, and Vonnegut moved to New York where he lived with magazine photographer Jill Krementz. In 1979, he officially divorced Cox and married Krementz. A few years later, the couple adopted a daughter, Lily, in 1982. Vonnegut and Krementz remained married until his death in 2007.
Later Years and Death
Despite his success, Vonnegut wrestled with his own personal demons. Having struggled with depression on and off for years, he attempted to take his own life in 1984. Vonnegut later wrote about the experience in his 1991 essay collection Fates Worse Than Death. Whatever challenges he faced personally, Vonnegut became a literary icon with a devoted following. He counted writers such as Catch-22 author Joseph Heller, another World War II veteran, as his friends.
In 2005, Vonnegut published his last major work A Man Without a Country, a collection of biographical essays. In it, he expressed his views on politics and art, and shed more light his own life experiences, including his time as a prisoner of war.
Vonnegut died on April 11, 2007, at the age of 84, as a result of head injuries sustained in a fall at his home in New York a few weeks earlier. A few years after death, in 2010, his hometown of Indianapolis honored him with the founding of the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library, which was later designated a Literary Landmark by the American Library Association in 2022. Vonnegut was also inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 2015
Quotes
- I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours.
- If you want to make people laugh or cry about little black marks on sheets of white paper, what is that but a practical joke? All the great story lines are great practical jokes that people fall for over and over again.
- You can’t write novels without a touch of paranoia. I’m paranoid as an act of good citizenship, concerned about what the powerful people are up to.
- I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you any different.
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